6 Urban risk and vulnerability
Insights and lessons from Latin American cities
Introduction
Climate change has increasingly become recognized as one of the greatest challenges to global efforts to meet sustainability and human security goals. However, climate change is a deeply local issue as well. Given that more than 50 percent of the world’s population is located in urban areas, cities bear both the opportunities and challenges for the integration of climate considerations into efforts towards meeting sustainability goals (Wheeler and Beatley, 2008). While previous scholarship has explored how hazards such as air pollution and climate variability affect the risks of negative health impacts on urban populations (e.g., Bell et al., 2008), research on urban risk has yet to develop a full understanding of the complexity of factors shaping the vulnerability of cities and urban populations and creating differences in health impacts within and between cities even when similar stressors are applied. This is especially true of Latin America where, compared to other parts of the world, urban vulnerability and risk have received little attention from scholars (Romero-Lankao et al., 2012b).
This chapter addresses this gap by exploring the complexity of factors and urbanization processes shaping urban vulnerability and risk in three Latin American cities. Drawing on a review of globally relevant literature that examines the linkages between urbanization and climate change, the chapter provides an analytical review of the climate relevance of urbanization. Notwithstanding the increasing number of studies on vulnerability, there is comparatively little research focusing specifically on the conceptualization of urban vulnerability and risk. Within existing scholarship, the interdisciplinary differences in definition and scope result in divergent narratives on the determinants and dimensions of urban vulnerability, and thus in diverging policy implications. In our project, “Adaptation to the Health Impacts of Air Pollution and Climate Extremes in Latin American Cities” (ADAPTE), we developed and tested our own framework, and explored the complex nature of urban risk and vulnerability to air pollution and climate change in the Latin American cities of Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Santiago. In this chapter, we will describe three of the study cities and present some research highlights from ADAPTE on whether health risks within cities are differentiated between neighborhoods by socioeconomic factors alone or whether, environmental factors must also be considered.
More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Therefore, any assessment of what factors may increase or reduce urban vulnerability and risk needs to begin from an understanding of four processes of and linkages between urbanization and climate change. First, the scale of urban population growth is unprecedented, with a quadrupling of urban populations between 1950 and 2007 and cities becoming ever larger and more crowded. For example, the number of cities with populations greater than 1 million increased from 75 in 1950 to 447 in 2011, while the average size of the world’s largest cities increased from 2 to 7.6 million (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2011: 3). This unprecedented growth is critical to considerations of urban vulnerability because in the absence of adequate governance structures, the concentration of populations, economic activities and built environments can turn urban centers into hotspots of vulnerability and risk.
Second, the urban transition in the twentieth century in Europe, North and Latin America, where nations changed from predominantly rural to increasingly urbanized, is now being replicated also in low- and middle-income countries in Asia and Africa. While these countries currently lack many of the institutions, resources and – in some cases – commitment to enhancing adaptive capacity and human security, more than 90 percent of the world’s urban population growth is occurring there, and they are currently home to nearly three-quarters of the world’s urban populations. These socioeconomic and institutional conditions, coupled with an increased intensity and frequency of adverse hydro-meteorological events brought by climate change, might further challenge these urban centers’ already low capacities to address development goals.
Third, smaller urban centers are registering the fastest rates of growth. In fact, it is in urban centers with fewer than 500 000 people, currently home to just over 50 percent of the world’s urban population, where, between 2009 and 2025, 45 percent of the world’s total increase in urban population is expected (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2011: 2). Smaller urban centers, in low- and middle-income countries, are often particularly institutionally weak, and unable to promote effective mitigation and adaptation actions (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2011). As the intensity and frequency of adverse weather events increases with climate change, devastating impacts may occur precisely where the capacity to adapt is weaker (IPCC, 2007). Conversely, because most of the development in these areas has yet to occur, there will be opportunities to reduce their vulnerability to climate hazards and other stresses while building necessary infrastructures, for example, by including climate proof features and effective response systems, or by the creation of the educational and political systems that support adaptive capacity.
In many low- and middle-income countries extremely high densities are associated with locally detrimental environmental health conditions while, elsewhere, urban form is becoming increasingly expansive with a high degree of sprawl (Seto et al., 2010). Urban form and density therefore play pivotal, yet not fully understood roles in the arena of human security. For instance, extremely low densities of many suburban areas (particularly in North America and Australia) are associated with high levels of household energy consumption and emissions. On the other hand, many health risks – including location in flood-prone areas, exposure to the urban heat-island effects or high levels of indoor air pollution– can be exacerbated by the high urban densities experienced in many low-income cities. At the same time, these high urban densities can create opportunities for simultaneously improving health and quality of life through policies related to effective public transport systems, urban planning, and affordable housing (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2011).
Fourth, urbanization has taken place in tandem with many other apparently insurmountable development problems (e.g., high levels of poverty, indigence and informality). Although around 30 percent of the world’s urban population lives in slums, the percentage ranges from 6 percent in developed nations to 78 percent in least developed countries (UN-Habitat, 2003: xxv). Because urban planning tends to support land development for formal settlements, informal settlements tend to be excluded and their needs for secure tenure, infrastructures and services neglected. Thus, the protection from floods and other hazards afforded by these infrastructures is often lacking in informal settlements (Birkmann et al., 2010).
Affluence and poverty, the two faces of the urban development coin, create a clear set of winners and losers, with different levels of responsibility for environmental degradation and differential capacities to respond to human-security threats. These differences ultimately crystalize in an inverse relationship clearly separating those who are most responsible for global environmental and climate change and those who will suffer its most profound consequences (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2011). One of the prime mechanisms of this inverse relationship occurs as uneven development and inadequate infrastructure and governance structures (e.g., insufficient sources of revenue for local authorities) constrain the ability of urban populations and authorities to adapt to existing and future climate change and to other environmental and societal stresses (Holgate, 2007).
Understanding urban vulnerability to climate change
Climate variability and change have a variety of implications for urban dwellers, economic sectors and on the network-infrastructures of urban centers, such as energy, waste water and transport systems (Gasper et al., 2011). However, a focus solely on the impacts, hazards and affected sectors does not allow for an understanding of the entire array of dimensions and determinants of urban vulnerability and risk. While risk refers to possible harmful consequences, vulnerability relates to the degree to which urban populations are susceptible to, or able to adapt to the adverse effects of one or more hazards. In a very vulnerable city (or neighborhood) more people would die during a summer heat wave than in a less vulnerable city (or neighborhood); the buildings and infrastructures of more vulnerable communities would be more damaged by floods than in a less vulnerable community. The task is, hence, to explore what makes a given city, neighborhood, population, or household more or less vulnerable, and to gain an understanding of these differences that is meaningful for policy and decision making at relevant levels.
As is the case with vulnerability in general, research on urban vulnerability is fragmented by disciplinary differences in definitions and methods. Furthermore, it is dominated by the urban vulnerability as impact paradigm, which suggests that more integrated studies should be undertaken (Romero-Lankao et al., 2012a). The numerous lineages of vulnerability research these methodologies and definitions represent (e.g., disaster risk community, political ecology, climate change community) have been summarized previously (Birkmann, 2006; Kienberger, 2010; Romero-Lankao et al., 2012a; Cardona et al., 2012). Therefore, here we will outline three approaches that have informed the framework developed for the ADAPTE project: urban vulnerability as impact, inherent vulnerability, and risk-society theory (Romero-Lankao and Qin, 2011).
The urban vulnerability as impact (or natural hazard) tradition conceives urban vulnerability as an outcome based on a population’s exposure, hazards and individual socioeconomic characteristics (Bell et al., 2008; Makri and Stilianakis, 2008). A large proportion of these studies have focused on cities in North America and Western Europe, whereas only limited research has been conducted in Latin America (O’Neill et al., 2005; Bell et al., 2008). This approach has shown the importance of hazards’ attributes in defining the quantitative relationship between hazards and outcomes (often defined by mortality). For example, while a very small change in ambient pollution levels can have substantial impacts on large populations (Makri and Stilianakis, 2008: 2), the temperature mortality relationship has a V or J shape, with mortality generally increasing both above and below some temperature threshold (Michelozzi et al., 2006; McMichael et al., 2008; Muggeo and Hajat, 2009).
Urban vulnerability as impact research has also shown that socioeconomic characteristics such as age, poverty and gender can modify or confound the severity of the health effects of hazards such as extreme temperatures and air pollution (Basu, 2009; Reid et al., 2008). For instance, the elderly, the very young and people with pre-existing medical conditions have been shown to be more sensitive to environmental hazards (Dear et al., 2005; Pope and Dockery, 2006). Lower levels of education are also associated with higher levels of mortality from extreme temperatures and air pollution (Smoyer, et al., 2000; Medina-Ramón and Schwartz, 2007). However, the effects of such socioeconomic features as income, poverty and ethnicity are mixed (O’Neill et al., 2005; Stafoggia et al., 2006; Ishigami et al., 2008; D’Ippoliti et al., 2010).
The inherent urban vulnerability lineage illuminates the structural drivers creating differences in vulnerability and adaptive capacity among and within urban populations. Yet, its scholars tend to differ in their emphasis on entry points for analysis and intervention. For example, a livelihoods’ approach focuses on the assets and options individuals and households draw from to cope with hazards (Pelling, 2003; Moser and Satterthwaite, 2010). Other scholars point to the fundamental role the state plays in shaping adaptive capacity, for instance, by promoting economic growth and poverty reduction; providing or warranting access to infrastructures and services, and fostering land and housing, and public emergency-response systems (Romero-Lankao and Qin, 2011).
Finally, among the many approaches to risk (Thywissen, 2006; Kienberger, 2010), Beck’s (1986) “risk society theory” deserves attention because it states that in the current era of capitalism, science and technology become the central mechanism to increase the production of goods, and thus to reduce material needs. Yet, at the same time, they become sources of “bads,” the negative byproducts of industrialization, such as climate change and air pollution. These “bads,” in turn, create risks that operate over large geographic scales, cut across sectors, and constrain or overwhelm the possibilities, tools and resources wealthy populations have previously had to escape from risk or compensate for risks, thus increasing their vulnerability. Beck refers to this dynamic as the “boomerang effect” and concludes that while “hunger is hierarchical, smog is democratic”.1 The risk society approach to urban vulnerability is therefore distinctive in that it suggests differences in urban vulnerability that are not only due to socioeconomic and institutional characteristics of the city and its population but also physical characteristics of the hazard itself.
In the ADAPTE project, the risk of adverse effects results from the combination of multiple social and environmental processes and dimensions that need to be addressed using more integrated approaches (Romero-Lankao et al., 2013). It depends on the nature of the heat waves, floods, fires and other hazards to which urban populations are exposed or subjected. It also depends on the dynamics of these populations’ sensitivity, capacity to respond and actual responses (O’Brien et al., 2007; Gallopín, 2006; Romero-Lankao et al., 2012a). Each of the dimensions has different components and can be approached at different levels. For instance, increases in cities’ average temperatures result not only from global and long-term anthropogenic GHG driven climate change, but also from local changes in air quality and temperature induced by urbanization. Sensitivity or the degree to which subsets of urban populations are susceptible to hazards depends on patterns of susceptibility based on both individual characteristics (e.g., age, gender, medical conditions) and neighborhood- or city-level social conditions responsible for differential hazards’ effects (e.g., equity in access to resources). The capacity and actual adaptations to avoid or lessen the negative consequences of hazards are determined by multilevel factors ranging from individual/household access to assets and options (e.g., income, good quality housing, air conditioning or heating appliances) to the extent and quality of urban infrastructures and services; and the quality and inclusiveness of governance structures, planning instruments and community organizations that provide or manage safety nets and other short- and longer-term responses (Figure 6.1).
We combined a set of quantitative and qualitative methods and data that draw from the described approaches to determine whether and under what conditions the people in these cities are vulnerable to temperature and air pollution hazards. The results presented here focus on the municipal level. Daily temperature data from the meteorological stations of each city provide information on maximum, mean, and minimum temperature. Air pollution data on three primary criteria pollutants, particulate matter (PM10), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone were collected from each city’s environmental agency. Mortality data on respiratory mortality and cardiovascular mortality were obtained from the public health agencies of each city. We used socio-demographic data such as education, poverty, income, age structure and housing condition from the study cities’ census offices to construct municipality-level measures of vulnerability based on the livelihoods approach. We developed a multidimensional vulnerability index (MVI) using a multi-criteria model of socioeconomic vulnerability that is based on four different types of livelihood assets: social, human, physical, and financial capitals (Baud et al., 2008; Romero-Lankao et al., 2013).
We used various statistical tools to identify the characteristics of and interactions among hazards, exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and health impacts. Exploratory Time Series Analysis helped us identify the temporal patterns of air pollution and temperature. A Generalized Linear Model (GLM) with Poisson log-linear distribution was used to explore the relative risks (RR) of mortality from exposure to hazards. We also tested the statistical correlations of exposure to major air pollutants and human mortality with socio-economic vulnerability to examine whether municipalities with different vulnerability levels can be differentiated with respect to health risks.
The cities
The climate of the cities ranges from Mediterranean (Santiago) to subtropical highland (Bogotá and Mexico City). While none of these cities experiences extreme variations in temperature, there are more seasonal variations in Mexico City and Santiago than in Bogotá (Table 6.1). Health risks due to atmospheric emissions are a concern in all three cities, particularly because atmospheric and meteorological conditions can be conducive to air pollutant retention and ozone formation (Molina and Molina, 2002). These hazards might be further intensified with climate change.
Bogotá, Mexico City and Santiago are the primary centers of their national economies, with each generating 25, 34 and 43 percent of its national GDP, respectively; each also concentrates populations, economic activities, energy and atmospheric emissions; and each is especially affected by hazards climate change is expected to aggravate, such as air pollution and changes in average temperatures. However, the effects of hazards and stresses on cities are not always negative. Socioeconomic, political and cultural factors help give urban populations, infrastructures and economic activities the ability to bounce back, recover from, and even take advantage of climatic and non-climatic stresses.
Differentiated urban development shapes adaptive capacities among urban populations. With all their dynamism and high levels of integration in the global economy, these cities are still faced with high levels of poverty, income inequality and informality. In aggregate, Table 6.1 demonstrates the strong presence of poverty, income inequality and informality in the cities, but, for a fuller picture of how these factors play out in each, we look here at municipality level differences. Although the local patterns of population and economic activities have changed in recent decades (e.g., with lower rates of demographic growth), spatial segregation within these cities remains a key characteristic. Core areas have registered slower growth and in some cases decay; high income, gated communities have grown in suburban and peri-urban areas; and low income, often informal, settlements occupy the periphery. Uneven development and inadequate infrastructure and governance structures constrain the ability of urban populations and authorities to adapt to existing and future hazards and stresses.
The cities have deficits in such key determinants of adaptive capacity as health (with high infant mortality rates in Mexico and Bogotá), education (with socially segregated school systems in all cities) and in housing with inadequate housing stock, informal settlements (with the exception of Santiago) and problems of housing affordability in all cities. Sometimes, decaying central areas and peri-urban areas are being inhabited by marginalized populations with inadequate services, a portfolio of precarious livelihood mechanisms, and the existence of a risk-management tradition that is long enough to address these underlying determinants of vulnerability. Last but not least, the levels of crime and violence are high in Mexico and Bogotá, which might undermine the influence of social capital (i.e., individual levels of social trust and participation in networks) on adaptive capacity.
ADAPTE: research findings
This section presents findings on some of the features and linkages between the components of urban vulnerability in Mexico City, Santiago and Bogotá. It explores the risks of mortality from exposure to hazards as well as whether socioeconomic factors between municipalities differentiate these risks within cities. Air quality data confirmed that air pollution is one of the most important sources of health risks to populations in urban Latin America (Bell et al., 2008). After organizing the air quality data, and comparing them with the World Health Organization recommendations for air quality, we found that Santiago has the highest concentration of PM10 while Mexico City presents the highest levels of ozone on average (Table 6.1). PM10 exceeded WHO standards by about 90 percent, and levels of nitrogen oxide exceeded WHO standards by up to 73 percent. Temporal trends for PM10 showed that the number of times that Mexico City’s records surpassed international standards was lower than that of Santiago and Bogotá (Romero-Lankao et al., 2013).
We used temporal series and a GLM to explore the risks of mortality from exposure to hazards and found that these relationships are complex and dependent on several factors such as temperature and unfavorable atmospheric conditions, high pressure or anti-cyclonic systems, which create higher pollution due to thermal inversions at night and during the first hours of the morning. Furthermore, while we found that higher outdoor temperatures led to lower mortality for both respiratory and cardiovascular causes (Figure 6.2), these positive effects could be offset by higher levels of particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of up to 10 μm (PM10), which are associated with higher mortality (Figure 6.3).
Our quantification of urban populations’ likelihood of mortality from exposure to hazards showed that higher temperatures during the warm season caused an increased risk of cardiovascular and respiratory mortality in Mexico City but only increased the risk of cardiovascular mortality in Bogotá (Romero Lankao et al., 2012b). Although some of our results were not statistically significant, overall they showed a positive correlation between mortality and air pollution, associating air pollution in a city with more respiratory and cardiovascular related deaths. However, the exact patterns of the association differ by city and weather conditions. For instance, while adverse impacts of PM10 are especially evident during the cold season in all three cities, only in Mexico City were there positive associations between the levels of PM10 and mortality during the warm season (Romero-Lankao et al., 2012b).
Scholarship tends to agree that the age, gender, and pre-existing health conditions may affect sensitivity to hazards. However, our measures of the relative risk of dying from exposure to PM10 show mixed and even unexpected results. For example, women and the elderly seem to be more sensitive than the total population only in some cases (e.g., respiratory mortality during the cold season in Mexico City), while they are equally or less sensitive in others (e.g., cardiovascular mortality in Bogotá and Mexico City). One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that neither women nor the elderly have a universal physiological susceptibility to air pollution and temperature, but rather that social conditions (e.g., occupation and equity in access to resources and social networks) are responsible for differential effects (Romero-Lankao et al., 2012a).
We explored whether the health risks related to air pollution and temperature are equally distributed or spatially and socio-economically differentiated within cities. We found differences in socioeconomic vulnerabilities, as measured by the MVI, within each city. We found larger disparities in socioeconomic vulnerability in Bogotá (with MVI ranging from 0.06 to 0.72), than in the other two cities. The MVI index ranges from 0.37 to 0.69 and 0.33 to 0.62 between the least and the most vulnerable municipalities respectively in Mexico City and Santiago. This suggests that wealthy populations may have the socioeconomic and political means, such as education, good quality houses and health services that allow them to escape from, or at least mitigate, some environmental risks.
From an environmental justice perspective, we would expect that spatial differences in health risks from environmental hazards relate to the socioeconomic characteristics of a population. However, within our studied cities, following the findings of other scholars studying different areas (Szasz and Meuser, 1997; Marshall, 2008), we have found this not always to be the case. In fact, only one district of Bogotá showed a positive correlation between the level of NO2 and social vulnerability, and exposure to PM10 was not correlated with vulnerability in any of the three cities (Romero-Lankao et al., 2013). Furthermore, some of both the most and the least vulnerable districts in the three cities are at similar relative risk of cardiovascular and respiratory mortality from exposure to PM10. It follows that the spatial differences in socioeconomic vulnerabilities within cities do not necessarily correspond with the spatial distribution of cardiovascular and respiratory mortality rates and at times these results were quite unexpected. For instance, some of the least vulnerable districts in the three cities had the highest mortality rates, while several of the most deprived communities had the lowest. We suggest that this finding was driven, at least in part, by the nature of the hazards and scales we were examining given that, at the city level, atmospheric pollutants tend to move about freely, without regard to socioeconomic and neighborhood boundary.
Concluding remarks
This chapter offered some insights on a series of challenges and opportunities posed by the complexity of societal and environmental factors shaping urban vulnerability and risk. It pointed to some aspects of urban change, such as the unprecedented scale and rate of growth of urban populations in recent decades that may be of relevance for actions seeking to reduce urban vulnerability and enhance human security. For example, the fastest rates of urbanization are currently taking place in low- and middle-income countries, with the bulk of this growth taking place in smaller urban areas, and these processes offer both challenges and opportunities. Smaller urban areas, particularly in developing countries, are often institutionally weak, and unable to promote effective adaptation and development policies. At the same time, the flourishing development of these centers may offer an opportunity if they can be redirected in ways that can enhance their sustainability in general and their ability to effectively respond to hazards and stresses, for instance through the development of effective disaster management systems and climate proof urban infrastructures that can simultaneously satisfy the needs of rich and poor alike. The recent change in urban form and density may also be a source of challenges and opportunities. High densities can exacerbate many factors determining climate risks (e.g., heat-island effect, air pollution). These same factors, however, can become sources of opportunities for simultaneously improving health and cutting GHG emissions through policies related to transport systems and more effective urban planning.
The nuanced nature of urban vulnerability and risk poses challenges that are further highlighted by the characteristics of existing scholarship. For example, the dominance of one paradigm and the discrepancies in scope, methods and policy implications constrain researchers’ ability to develop a more integrated understanding of the multiple dimensions and determinants involved. To fill the gap, the ADAPTE project included the design of an integrated framework to explore some of the key features and linkages among the dimensions and determinants of urban vulnerability and risk. Our findings suggest that researchers need to consider the attributes of the hazards to which urban populations are exposed. In our cities, for instance, the risks associated with high concentrations of PM10, ozone and other criteria pollutants depended, first, on whether atmospheric and meteorological conditions were conducive to air pollutant retention, ozone formation and more intense heat islands. Each of our assessed hazards had different health impacts; while lower temperatures relate to higher cardiovascular and respiratory mortality (pointing to a negative mortality/temperature relationship), higher levels of PM10 relate to higher mortality (pointing to a positive mortality/PM10 relationship).
Our findings on the risk of mortality among sensitive groups do not support existing literature that emphasizes a universal physiological susceptibility to air pollution and temperature within vulnerable populations such as the elderly or women. On the contrary, we found divergent trends in the data on how age and gender related to mortality risk. We suggest, hence, more empirical work needs to be done on the influence of occupation, education, equity in access to resources, cultural roles, social networks and other factors that may explain differences in risk mortality among sensitive groups.
Even considering these additional determinants of mortality risk, however, our study found that threats such as air pollution reach threshold levels at which the importance of socioeconomic factors falls away. Although wealthy populations in the three cities have access to education, good quality housing and health services to mitigate some environmental risks, overall, health risks from air pollution and temperature in the study cities do not necessarily depend on socio-economic differentiations. We suggest therefore, that health risks from atmospheric conditions and pollutants act without boundaries or social distinctions and show characteristics of a boomerang effect at least at the relatively small spatial scales of urban areas. This finding suggests that in a plausible future increased levels may interact with more intense urban heat islands, heat waves and other climate change effects, and pose risks to rich and poor alike.
In the final analysis, this may turn out to offer the greatest reason for hope, as anything perceived as a universal threat is more likely to gain the attention needed to drive effective action to reduce the urbanization drivers of emissions, vulnerability and risk. To be successful, policies will need to be developed to turn the hazards resulting from human pressures on the environment into sources of opportunities and innovations aimed at building more resilient and sustainable cities.
1 “Not ist hierarchisch, Smog ist demokratisch” (Beck, 1986: 48).
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